‘By the end of our journey together we had signally failed to understand each other, yet an unlikely, even unprecedented connection had formed.’
Until I was in my twenties, I had never seen an Aborigine. Black Australians constituted one per cent of the population, and that one per cent was mostly located on reserves outside rural towns, or in outback government and mission settlements.
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‘We meet at various points in the great swathes of the past that neither of us were alive to witness.’
Allen Bratton on a daytrip to a castle with his older boyfriend.
‘Listening to three white poets, whom I suspect are academics, talk about the state of poetry.’
Oluwaseun Olayiwola eavesdrops on an older generation.
‘I’d been dubious about his company at first.’
Sarah Moss on watching Shakespeare with her twelve-year-old son.
‘She didn’t trust us because, to her, tenants were like children.’
Kate Zambreno on negotiating with her older landlady.
‘A moment now swallowed in embarrassment, I asked a question only a young person might ask an older one.’
Lynne Tillman on trying to understand what makes a generation.
‘Hearing, they say, is the first of the senses we develop in the womb.’
’Shortly after its publication in 1980 I was surprised to learn that I had written a travel book’.
‘Is there in fact a jostling for dominance between the art forms, some barely suppressed competitiveness?’
Adam Mars-Jones on music and ceremony.
‘Into the carrot-coloured bag, alongside my clothes, I put the box with Mama’s urn.’
An excerpt from Oksana Vasyakina’s Wound, translated from the Russian by Elina Alter.
‘The boy is long dead, of course. Buried outside of town in a pile with the rest of the bodies.’
Historical fiction by Nathan Harris.
